Our daily Bread
May 13 in The Word
We have such a heritage of Godly men and women that impacted the history of this nation as they sought God and His plan and purposes for their life. Walking with God they obtained the impossible and touched countless lives. One such man was George Müller who reached out to over 10,000 orphans in his generation. He opened orphanages providing shelter, care, food and education for them and His legacy continues in Bristol today. He never asked for a penny yet through prayer saw God provide for every one of their needs.
Here is an extract of his autobiography:
‘While I was staying at Nailsworth, it pleased the Lord to teach me a truth … The point is this: I saw more clearly than ever, that the first great and primary business to which I ought to attend every day was … not, how much I might serve the Lord … but how I might get my soul into a happy state and how my inner man might be nourished. For I might seek to set the truth before the unconverted, I might seek to benefit believers, I might seek to relieve the distressed… and yet… not being nourished and strengthened in my inner man day by day, all this might not be attended to in a right spirit…
I saw, that the most important thing I had to do was to give myself to the reading of the Word of God and to meditation on it, that thus my heart might be comforted, encouraged, warned, reproved, instructed; and that thus, whilst meditating, my heart might be brought into experimental, communion with the Lord.
I began therefore, to meditate on the New Testament, from the beginning, early in the morning. The first thing I did… was to begin to meditate on the Word of God; searching, as it were, into every verse, to get blessing out of it; not for the sake of the public ministry of the Word; not for the sake of preaching on what I had meditated upon; but for the sake of obtaining food for my own soul. The result I have found to be almost invariably this, that after a very few minutes my soul has been led to confession, or to thanksgiving, or to intercession, or to supplication … turned almost immediately more or less into prayer.
… I go on to the next words or verse, turning all, as I go on, into prayer for myself or others, as the Word may lead to it; but still continually keeping before me, that food for my own soul is the object of my meditation…
The result of this is… that my inner man almost invariably is even sensibly nourished and strengthened and that by breakfast time, with rare exceptions, I am in a peaceful if not happy state of heart. Thus also the Lord is pleased to communicate unto me that which, very soon after, I have found to become food for other believers…
… being nourished by the truth… I speak to my Father, and to my Friend… about the things that He has brought before me in His precious Word… Now what is the food for the inner man: not prayer, but the Word of God… considering what we read, pondering over it, and applying it to our hearts…
How different when the soul is refreshed and made happy early in the morning, from what is when, without spiritual preparation, the service, the trials and the temptations of the day come upon one!’